Why Relationships and Connection Feel So Hard After Complex Trauma

Hi, I'm Sarah Herstich and welcome to the Complex Trauma podcast. I'm an EMDR and Sematic Trauma therapist and I'm passionate about helping people reclaim their lives from the impact of trauma. If you're working on healing and still wondering why your body won't get on board or why you can't just move past all of this already, you're in the right place. We talk about what's actually happening in your nervous system, the trauma responses you've been living with, and why none of this feels as easy as people make it sound. No quick fixes, no pretending any of this is easy. Just honest conversations about what complex trauma does and what it actually takes to feel like yourself again. Let's get into it. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Complex Trauma podcast. Today, we're diving into why connection can feel so hard after complex trauma. This was another episode that was voted on over on Instagram in my polls and I had like a cluster of questions about connection and feeling safe in relationships after complex trauma. You might resonate with some of these statements because this is what the questions we're kind of speaking to. You want someone to actually understand you and the second that they get close enough to kind of try, there are parts of you that start to build an exit strategy. You want support so badly that it hurts sometimes and when someone finally asks if you're okay, the words that come out so fast are, I'm fine, before you've even decided to say them out loud. You want closeness and it's like the moment someone gives you exactly that, you feel yourself pull back before you even know why. Maybe you're still waiting for the people who hurt you to finally get it, to turn around and say, you know what, I see what I did. I'm sorry, I get it. You've been waiting for a long, long time. So why does connection, the very thing that we're wired for, the thing that we say we want more than almost anything else, feel so complicated? I'm going to try to give you an overview today because I think that we could do like 100 episodes on this. So just say with that question for a minute, I think we often rush past that and move straight towards trying to fix ourselves in relationships or trying to fix our relationships in general, but you want the thing and that thing also scares you both are true. So let's just start with what relationships teach the nervous system. Before we get into all of it, the receiving, the conflict, the way that you pull back when someone else gets kind of close to you, I want to talk a little bit about something that's underneath all of that because I don't think that anything really makes sense without this first piece. Why does any of this happen in the first place? And the answer to that is attachment. And I know that that word is kind of thrown out a lot on social media, online in the trauma space. I've probably heard it like a hundred times at this point and you probably have seen quizzes about whether you're anxious or avoid it. And that's actually not where we're going to go today. I will talk about attachment really quickly. It is not like some box that you get sorted into one time and then you like carry this thing around for the rest of your life. What attachment is is a term for something that's a whole lot bigger. It's the study of how your earliest relationships taught your nervous system, what to expect from closeness itself. It's like is it okay to have needs? What happens when I'm upset? Can I count on someone showing up? Does conflict mean this is the end? Can I fully be myself and so belong here? Attachment it gets built moment by moment and exchanges that you are probably even too young to even remember before you have language to make sense of any of this with your caregivers. That's attachment. It's not a label. It's not a fixed way of being in your life or in your relationships. It's a prediction that your body built out of real evidence before you had any say in really anything and then it's reinforced over time. What that means is that by the time you're an adult, you're not walking into relationships as a blank slate. You're actually walking in with a nervous system that's already decided what closeness will or won't cost you. Like I said, attachment isn't a box that you get sorted into. It's the prediction that your body built about what to expect from love and closeness long before you had words for it. What does that prediction actually look like once you're grown up, once you're the one inside of the relationship instead of the little kid learning what to expect from one? A couple things that are probably worth knowing about how a prediction like this actually works because it might change how you relate to it. These predictions about relationships and closeness and love, they weren't built from one bad moment. It was built from evidence, repeated enough times that your nervous system stopped treating it as possibility and started treating it as fact. It isn't stored the way that you'd store a memory that you can recall and go back over in your mind. It's implicit, it's held in the body, which is exactly why understanding it right now in this moment intellectually, it doesn't automatically undo anything. Knowing prediction exists and then untreating it are two different processes. We talk about this a lot on the podcast. It doesn't show up as one big story. I'm going to go into five different recognizable places that this can show up. Each one is built around the same underlying question. Is this actually safe? Let's go through these real quick one at a time. The first one is receiving. Why does receiving feel harder than giving? It's like someone compliments you and you deflect it. Someone offers you help and your first instinct is like, "No, no, no, I've got it." Someone is really kind to you out of nowhere. You wonder, "Do I even deserve this?" What are they even talking about? It's like you feel impenetrable to the kindness. It doesn't land. It doesn't get fully absorbed. Have you ever noticed that you apologize right after someone does something nice for you? Or that you're already planning on how you'll pay someone back before they've even finished helping you with something or that you feel a flash of guilt when someone remembers something really small about you? Like no one's really ever thought that much about you before or even cared that much to remember something so small. So let's just pause for a second with those things. Maybe try to think of an actual moment recently. Someone offered to help you. It doesn't have to be like a big moment, right? It can be at the grocery store or someone saying like, "Oh, can I get the door for you?" Or something like that. And if you're picturing it in your mind and if it feels okay to check in with your body right now, just kind of notice what's happening when you picture it. Your shoulders, your jaw, your breath. If something feels a little bit tight about the thought of someone helping you, maybe even it feels blank or numb. But if something shifted inside when you imagined someone offering to help you with something, that's the pattern. And in these moments when you're out in the world, it happens a whole lot faster than thought. So the evidence that built this response is usually kindness followed by a cost, a compliment that came with an agenda or help that got used against you later at some point. Enough of that. And receiving itself actually becomes the threat. It's not modesty or being low maintenance. It really is that prediction that's running exactly as it was designed. Giving often feels safe because you're the one in control of it. You decide what to offer, how much when it stops. Receiving means someone else is doing something for you and you don't get to set the terms, which is exactly the kind of unpredictability that evidence was built from. So of course, you'd rather give than receive. You might call it generosity, giving more easily than you receive. But your nervous system, it might just kind of call it staying in control of the one thing that it was never able to control before. And there's that question underneath all of this is receiving care, is receiving help, is receiving relationship, is this actually safe? Okay, the next thing, depending on people, we often see hyperdependence here. Why does needing someone feel like a risk instead of just a normal part of being a person? You might be the one that people call when things are falling apart. You've got a system for everything. You'd rather stay up until two in the morning, solving it all on your own than sending one text asking for help. If you've been around the podcast for a while, you know that this is one that I've been working on for a long time. So I get it. And somewhere along the way, this got celebrated, right? You started calling it being strong because admitting otherwise kind of feels scary. So here, notice if you instinctively kind of draft an explanation for why you don't need help with things. Whether that's at work or home in your friendships, maybe all the places even before anyone's even offered it. I know a lot of people talk about being super independent as part of their personality, right? But in this context, we're talking about it as an impulse, like a reflex and reflexes are usually built from somewhere and often hyperindependence or having trouble depending on people can come from inconsistency. Someone who was there sometimes and not others or there are even physically, but not in any way that you could actually really lean on. And enough of that and your body stops tracking individual people and starts tracking like a whole category of people, right? There's this generalization of needing anyone feeling unreliable, feeling dangerous in some ways. That's the part that makes this really kind of sticky. It's not a rule about one specific person anymore. It's generalized out, which is why as adults, sometimes we can't tell the difference between a caregiver who wasn't safe to need and a partner who's standing right in front of you, asking to help you carry the groceries inside. The prediction that gets built in your system is not about the person, right? It's about the whole category, the depending and doing everything yourself. That was like a workaround, right? To stay safe and the workaround it worked. It got you through. But then the problem, of course, is that it never gets an update and it just keeps expanding who it's actually applied to. So hyperindependence or having a hard time depending on people, my generalization is that it's not who you are. It's a rule of your nervous system that was kind of written a long time ago that the safest number of people to depend on is like zero. And then as an adult, the rule keeps running, protecting you from danger that might not even be in the same room with you anymore. If you wanna hear more about that, I'll link to the episode on emotional flashbacks in the show notes. So back to that question that we started with is is this actually safe? Is depending actually safe? Okay, so the next one is conflict. What would you need to believe about a relationship to stop like rehearsing every conversation before you have it? So have you ever noticed that you start a fight right when things are going the best that they've gone actually in a little while? Or you find yourself like testing someone, pushing to see if this is the moment that they finally leave, without even realizing that's what you're doing. Sometimes we see this happening when your body, when your system is certain that something terrible is about to happen, simply because something good is happening. And it's like you're trying to get the bad part over with on your own terms instead of waiting for it to come on someone else's terms. I think a lot of us grew up kind of believing that secure relationships look like ease, right? They should be easy. Two people who just get each other, no friction or heart conversations, nothing to really manage. But in the most securely attached relationships that researchers have ever studied, connection actually breaks down close to 70% of the time, 70% like when your parent looks away, when the timing is off, when someone misses your cue, that actually doesn't indicate a flaw in the relationship, that's most of the relationship. But what actually matters isn't that mismatch. It's whether someone comes back. So if you've spent a lot of your life reading like regular friction in relationships, like disagreements, someone having a bad day or a heart conversation, as evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the relationship, that kind of conflict may not necessarily be a threat, maybe the absence of repair was the threat. So now you're braced for conflict. And I wanna talk about real quick what this is and what it isn't. This is about rupture and repair between two people who are both fundamentally safe. It's not permission to stay somewhere physically violent or abusive or call what happens afterward repair. If there's violence, repair was never the missing piece, full stop. Physical abuse changes this whole equation, a nervous system that's learned violence can follow conflict, stops experiencing disagreement the way a securely attached nervous system does. It can't really tell the difference between someone raising their voice and someone raising a hand. Because at some point, those two things maybe happen together enough times that the body stopped waiting to find out which one was coming. We often see that every disagreement starts to get read from the body as the possible start of danger, not because you're overreacting to anything, but because your body is working from the only evidence that it has. And the version of repair that often shows up after violence like the apology, the sudden affection, the promise it won't happen again, is not the same thing that research is describing when it's talking about the importance of repair after conflict. That cycle, tension building, an incident, an apology, a comp period, then tension building again, is often part of how the abuse sustains itself rather than evidence that the relationship is safe. And the relief that you can feel during the comp part is really real, your nervous system probably does relax in some ways. That's exactly what makes a whole cycle so disorienting and so hard to leave. So here's where this kind of leaves us. If what you're dealing with is ordinary ruptures, right? Conflict and relationship. Two people who are both safe enough, both trying, sometimes missing each other, that mismatch, that's not the threat. It's uncomfortable. It can be hard and painful, and that can feel threatening, but the real threat may be the absence of repair that your body got used to. Secure connection, it doesn't run on, staying in sync with someone. It runs on proving over and over again that disconnection is temporary and someone comes back. And if you didn't experience that for a long time growing up, of course, that's what you anticipate now. If what you're dealing with is a history of violence, of abuse, the question changes. It shifts a bit. It's not about repair anymore. It's about whether you're safe. If your nervous system already learned as a kid, that love and danger kind of showed up together, violence, it doesn't always trigger the alarm you'd expect it to. It can at times register as familiar instead of urgent. That can be a prediction built from your experiences as a kid. So this is a very similar prediction, but kind of on the other end of the spectrum, then what we talked about earlier. And I think a lot of people with complex trauma who've experienced physical abuse in their lifetime can relate to both ends of the spectrum, kind of bouncing back and forth where on one side, every disagreement gets read as the possible start of danger. And on the other side, violence, conflict, it can register as that familiar pattern in relationships. So that's not you being naive or not caring about yourself, right? That's the prediction that was built from evidence of your childhood a long time ago. These experiences that happened over and over again, and it's doing exactly what predictions do, reading new danger through old familiar evidence. And again, the same question goes underneath all of this in terms of conflict is this actually safe. Okay, next is authenticity. This is where we see a lot of people pleasing. I can link to this episode in the show notes as well. We dove into people pleasing a handful of episodes ago, I think. So why does telling someone the truth about how you feel? Sometimes feel a whole lot more dangerous than just telling them what they want to hear? I'm sure you know the feeling. Someone asks for your opinion, and it's like you kind of look outward before you look inward. You agree to plans you didn't want to make. You laugh at things that don't land right or you apologize for things that absolutely were not your fault. Or you even shrink down your reactions to something that feels more manageable before it even comes out of your mouth. And I bet you're really good at it. That's the part that can make this so hard to catch. It's kind of like you've gotten so good at managing everyone else's experience of you that you've lost track of what your own actual experience even is. So the evidence that this kind of prediction in relationships that you can't really be authentic and feel safe. They usually came from years of your whole nervous system being built from the people whose reactions mattered more than anyone else's ever could. Kind of like crying and being told to stop. Or an opinion that you got laughed at for or actually even like completely dismissed excitement that was pushed aside from people whose reaction mattered more than anyone else's ever would again. That really is foundational information. Your body used to decide what honesty, what authenticity is allowed to cost. And as an adult, it's kind of like that original audience. They never really laughed because some part of you is still performing for the people or the person who first taught you that being yourself, that honesty wasn't safe. So the prediction is that you're kind of still responding to a room of people that aren't really there anymore. People pleasing, it isn't being fake, right? It also isn't being super, super nice and sweet. It's a trade that your nervous system made a really long time ago. Authenticity for safety. So there it is, that same question that's still running underneath all of it is this actually safe. Am I actually safe? Okay, the last one is staying connected. And what I mean by this is managing connection versus experiencing connection. Why do you work so hard to keep a relationship running? Instead of just getting to be in it. I had a few questions on this. It's like you leave family gatherings feeling more tired than you actually arrived from managing other people, tracking everyone's mood, smoothing things over before they become like a whole thing, making sure no one's upset, including the people that never actually asked you if you wanted that job. They just assumed that you'd take it a long time ago. It's like you've become the maintenance crew for relationships you're actually supposed to be enjoying. So this prediction, right, it usually comes from a few different things, keeping a parents mood from tipping, keeping a household from splitting. And you know what, you were probably really accurate about needing to do these things. Omega, another generalization here, that that part as a kid that wasn't distorted. It felt like an order for things to stay steady, for things to feel safe. You had to do that. You had to manage things. So it's like the prediction got generalized from one house to every room that you ever walk into. So now with people who love you, who really probably aren't going anywhere, some part of you is still working really, really hard to manage that. If you can't remember the last time you were fully present in a relationship instead of actually managing it, you probably learned that you had to. And your nervous system has been operating off of that prediction ever since. So these are five different struggles, right? Five different ways that nervous systems adapt to answer the question, is this actually safe? Is this relationship safe? Am I safe in it? Am I actually safe? So let's talk about what secure connection actually feels like. We just talked about these kind of like five different flavors of dysregulation that can show up in connection in your relationships and receiving connections that theme of am I safe? And secure connection, it really isn't just the absence of all of that. It really is a very specific kind of felt experience. It feels like not rehearsing a conversation before you have it. Like disappointing someone is still believing that you'll be okay tomorrow. It feels like asking for help without immediately apologizing for needing it, leaving a hard conversation out. replaying like every single sentence on the drive home. It feels like not being the only person responsible for keeping the relationship alive. And it feels like joy, not just kind of happiness in general, the kind that happens with another person. Play, delight, being silly without checking first if it's appropriate, relaxing enough around someone to be really unguarded. Trauma doesn't just interrupt safety and trust. It also interrupts shared delight too. And that's one of the kind of softer losses and something that people don't often talk about. And I think it's one of the very first things worth noticing when it first starts to come back. I think a trap that the conversation about trauma can kind of lead us into online is that there's this idea that healing means needing people less. And it really doesn't. It looks like interdependence, being able to lean on someone and trusting they'll still be standing there, being fully known and so belonging. That's really what secure connection was always supposed to feel like. And if you've never felt what I just described before, it makes sense if you have complex trauma and you're here and it's information. It tells us what your nervous system hasn't gotten to practice yet, which means that it's not something that's wrong with you. I know that for a lot of you, a lot of us, the gap between knowing that this secure connection can exist and having never experienced it, it can have kind of a name attached to it. Kind of specific people, people you loved and in some cases you still do love because some of the people who hurt you, you still love. Loving them didn't stop because they hurt you. And I think that's one of the most confusing parts about complex trauma recovery. In some ways, it feels so much easier to write a clean story. They were bad. I got out and I'm fine now. But real life doesn't usually work that way. So you keep waiting, maybe not consciously, but some part of you is still waiting for that moment that they finally get it where they say, I see what I did to you. I understand now. I'm sorry. And if you're anything like the complex trauma survivors that I know, you've probably been waiting for a lot longer than you'd like to admit. Something that I'm going to invite you to sit with is that love and capacity are not the same thing. Someone can love you. And the only way that they know how and still not have the capacity to regulate their own emotions, to repair after rupture, to see you clearly, to delight in who you actually were instead of who you needed to be. Those are two different questions. Did they love me? And could they actually do the thing that love requires? And a lot of us have only been asking the first question. And once you can hold both of these things at the same time, there's space for something to shift. In some ways, you can stop needing them to have loved you in order to justify how much it hurt. And what it leaves space for is the grief, not the trauma. If you're here, I'm guessing that you've done a lot of work on the trauma. I'm talking about the grief that comes when you finally accept that they may never fully understand what happened. They may never apologize in the way that you needed. They may never become the parent, the partner, the friend. You kept hoping they'd grow into. And that's a really significant loss. It's grief without a clear ending. No ritual because the person is still here, sometimes still sitting across the table from you out of holiday. And it's confusing. And the confusion that you feel, wondering if you're even allowed to grieve someone who still alive, is a really accurate response to something that is truly unresolved. The situation is confusing. You are not. And with trauma work and with grief work, when you've grieved this, more things become possible that weren't possible, oh, for. There's space for the relationship to become what it can realistically be. Instead of spending your whole life waiting for it to be something else, that might mean less contact. It might mean the same amount of contact with completely different expectations. It might mean loving someone from a distance that finally makes sense for both of you. There really is no universal right answer here, but you really don't have to choose between loving someone and grieving what they couldn't give you. But they're true at once, and grief is what finally lets you stop waiting. So I want to kind of offer a different way to think about what your hard relationships have been doing to you. It's easier to hear all of this and land on. My relationships, they keep triggering all of my wounds. But I think there's something more useful to talk about here. Your relationships don't just reveal who you love. They reveal what your nervous system learned to expect from love. So really, it's not like a wound is reopening. What it is is development still waiting to finish. A wound implies something happened when left in Mark. An unfinished development means that there's still a process that's available to you. Still something that can complete. So where does all of this leave us? If all of this got built in relationship, it makes sense that it also gets rebuilt there. Not in one big moment, of course, and not really through simple repetition, either. What actually moves your nervous system is a moment that directly contradicts what it expected to happen. A small surprise, it can't easily explain away. Enough of those and the old prediction stops being the only one your body trusts. So letting someone help you with something small and you let yourself actually feel it land instead of immediately deflecting it. Letting repair count. When someone comes back after disconnect and says, "I'm sorry," or even shows up differently, let that actually register instead of waiting and bracing for the next rupture to prove it didn't mean anything at all. It's comfort without following it up with an apology for needing it. Ask for support out loud, even when the part of you that learn to manage everything alone is telling you that you really don't need it. Stay in the room during a hard conversation instead of leaving it physically or otherwise, the second something gets uncomfortable. Let kindness actually land instead of deflecting it before it reaches you. Practice being honest with the people who've actually earned it, even if it's just one sentence at a time. None of this has to happen perfectly. It's really not supposed to. None of these things got built in one moment back when you were a kid. They got built through thousands of small ones probably, which means they don't need one big breakthrough to rebuild either. One safe conversation, one repair, one moment of being comforted, one person who stays again and again and again. That's kind of the unglamorous look of healing. It's not about getting it right, just enough small, different experiences over and over again until your body finally updates what it expects from people. What do you do when you don't necessarily have relationships to fall back on to rebuild connection, to rebuild trust to do this kind of healing relational work? Because everything I just said, it really kind of points towards relationship as the place where healing happens. Sure, you've heard a lot of that online because it's true. Healing does happen in relationships. What do you do when you don't have relationships to fall back on and when isolation is the actual kind of condition that you're healing inside of? If that's you right now, I really don't want you to hear that healing happens in relationship as one more thing that you're failing at because isolation, it doesn't disqualify you from healing. It just means we have to get honest about where relationship is actually available to you, even in a form smaller than the one that you maybe picture when you think about relationships. Relationship, it doesn't only mean the deep, the ongoing, the chosen kind, and it doesn't only mean another person either. Your nervous system, it really doesn't require intimacy to register a new experience. A therapist is a relationship, a support group where you say like five sentences the entire hour is a relationship, a neighbor who says good morning every day is a small, repeated piece of evidence that the world is responding to you. So it's a dog who's really happy every single time you walk through the door or a cat that sits next to you as you're watching TV at night. So is 15 minutes outside since your nervous system reads consistent, predictable, non-threatening input from the natural world as safety too. It doesn't require that input to come from another person's face. And also so does routine. So a body that knows what's coming next like the same walk, the same time you make coffee, the same lights that go on before dark is a body collecting evidence of reliability when no other person is involved at all. Predictability is always part of good relationship and you can build some of that on your own too before anyone else really shows up to help. I feel like some of you who are listening know exactly what it's like to want closeness so bad it like almost hurts and to also feel like closeness might be the thing that kind of takes you out. What usually builds this is closeness that turned dangerous, maybe a hug that turned rough or affection that flipped into anger with no warning and distance that turned dangerous to like pulling away that got you punished or left alone for so long that it stopped feeling like some sort of neutral choice. It's like two different directions both teaching the same lesson which is why there was never a consistently safe option to generalize from and that's also why it does the only thing it can. It kind of feels like there are two different directions both of those directions teaching the same lesson that there is never a consistently safe option for your body to settle on which is why your body it does the only thing left available to reach and then pull back over and over trying to solve a problem that never really had a solution to it. If that's caused you most of your relationships, I don't want you to hear this episode as the description of a life that you're kind of locked out of. The way that we work with this doesn't wait for you to already have relationships before it starts. Treatment builds relationships on purpose in small structured doses, like a skills group where you practice just sitting in the room with people, a therapist who shows up every week, whether or not you feel worthy of that showing up on that day. Support in the middle of a crisis that doesn't depend on having someone in your life to call like a crisis line. None of that really requires you to have a relational world. It requires you to show up in the smallest structured version of one over and over again until your nervous system starts collecting different evidence. And your relationship with yourself, it really counts. Learning to notice your body without pulling away from it. To speak to yourself in the way you'd want someone else to speak to you is actual practice. It's the same nervous system doing the same work just without another person in the room yet. It's building the capacity that will let you actually receive connection when it does show up instead of white knuckling through it or running the second it gets close. And on nights when even that feels unavailable, there's something else that you can do even if you're completely alone. And it's looking for glimmers and it's really deliberately small, things like a hot shower. Your pet's weight against your leg, a voice on the podcast that you feel like gets it. 15 seconds, maybe even five seconds of your body registering safety instead of threat. That in no way fixes isolation and it's not supposed to. What it does is it gives your nervous system one small piece of evidence that safety is possible so that when a bigger relational moment actually does show up, some part of you is already recognizing what safety feels like and it knows it enough to let it in. And I do really want to be honest about this because I think that your relationship with yourself, it can hold you, it can regulate you. It was never designed to be the whole thing forever because as humans we are wired for connection. Your nervous system still benefits from actual relational input eventually. But you don't need a full relational world to start this work. You need one place, even a small one, where your nervous system gets to practice something different than what it learned. I want you to remember that your capacity for closeness, it didn't disappear because of all that you've gone through. It's been trying to protect you under conditions where both distance and closeness have felt dangerous. Structured support counts as real practice and even alone on the hardest days. There are ways to give your nervous system evidence that safety does exist. So to close this episode out, let's go back to the very beginning of this episode for a second. When I talked about someone gets close enough to actually understand you and some part of you starts building an exit anyway or someone asks you if you're okay. And I'm fine, flies out of your mouth. When someone gives you the closeness that you've always wanted and your body negotiates for space regardless. I want you to know that none of that has to be the story forever. It also doesn't have to be erased. It also doesn't have to be resolved in one day. Maybe just no longer the only option that your body reaches for. You really don't have to trust everyone. You just need relationships where you get to be fully yourself, where you get to stay a little bit more connected and stop believing a little bit more that love doesn't have to be earned. And maybe that's what all of this actually is. Not a promise that everyone stays. Not becoming someone who never gets scared of closeness again. But becoming someone who can stay anyway. That you can be fully known a little bit more over time and stay. That you can need someone a little bit more over time and stay. That you can disagree and stay. That you can become more and more yourself and stay. So before you go, I want to leave you with just a couple of things to notice this week. Not homework, just noticing if that's available to you, if not cool, skip it. When someone helps you, what actually happens inside your body? When someone misunderstands you, what story does your nervous system reach for first? When someone repairs with you, can you let yourself believe them, even if it's a little bit? What tells you that you can or can't? You don't have to change any of it right now. Just notice. That's where all of this, healing, all of this work actually starts. Okay, everyone, that's what I have for you today. I hope that this answered the questions that came in about why connection feels so hard after complex trauma. If you have questions, as always, shoot me a DM on Instagram or send me an email. I love hearing from you. And I will be back next week for another episode. Until then, take good care of yourself. Thanks for listening to the Complex Trauma podcast. If this episode helped, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you have a minute, leaving a review really does help other people find the podcast. You can follow along on Instagram at Sarah, her stage, LCSW for more in-between episodes. If you're looking for an EMDR or trauma therapist and want to work with us at Reclame Therapy in Pennsylvania, you can find us at www.ReclameTherapeutic.org. And a quick reminder, I am a therapist, but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 911, caller text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or head to your nearest ER. Thanks so much for being here, and we'll see you next week.